Current Environmental Health Reports最新文献

Purpose of review: This scoping review characterizes research on consumer attitudes towards meat sustainability, with a focus on environmental impact and animal welfare, from peer-reviewed articles and gray literature sources published globally between 2010-2022.

Recent findings: Consumers are important levers of change for advancing meat sustainability. While more narrowly focused systematic reviews exist, consumer attitudes are complex and this area is methodologically diverse. Analysis of 512 peer-reviewed articles and 31 gray literature sources revealed growth in this area since 2010. Included studies spanned 65 countries, with more representation from higher-income countries, especially in earlier years. Consumer attitudes are multidimensional, which is reflected in the wide array of attitudinal constructs and methodological approaches in this literature. Most studies examined consumer attitudes towards multiple species or towards meat or livestock in general. While climate impacts were the most commonly studied specific sustainability consideration, lending some support to the "carbon tunnel vision" hypothesis, the most common approach was to study environmental impact or animal welfare only at a general level, which we characterize as a "blurred vision"-a lack of focus on specific sustainability considerations, and their complexity and tradeoffs. Peer-reviewed and gray literature sources offer complementary perspectives, with many gray literature sources leveraging large public opinion polls and many peer-reviewed articles studying the mechanisms behind these polls. We recommend engaging broadly with multiple methodological approaches, and with both peer-reviewed and gray literature. Advancing the sustainability of animal agriculture requires the exchange of research findings across multiple scientific disciplines and sectors.

Purpose of review: Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a novel approach to research built environmental determinants of physical activity for its ability to address issues of causality, which have historically plagued the discipline. The purpose of this narrative review is to identify the methods by which VR technology has been adapted for use within the research area.

Recent findings: Current built environmental VR research examining physical activity overwhelmingly targets walking and cycling. Despite spanning few types of PA, we observe diverse VR methodologies and patterns of applications within research areas. In this review, we explore how capabilities of current VR technology, specifically simulation development and travel, have shaped research questions, validity, and generalizability. We identify future innovations that may address these limitations. Finally, we encourage future research applying this powerful research tool to investigations of built environmental factors promoting types of physical activity apart from walking and cycling.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) presents unprecedented opportunities and challenges for assessing planetary health, particularly in environmental health. As a key determinant of human well-being, the environment significantly influences health. Although the application of AI in these areas has garnered increasing attention, a comprehensive evaluation framework is still lacking. In this review, we bridge this gap by proposing a unified evaluation framework that spans the entire environmental health research continuum, from modeling environmental exposures to assessing health outcomes and inferring causal relationships. We synthesize recent methodological innovations, application scenarios, and emerging trends across these interconnected domains. Our work highlights how AI can enhance accuracy, scalability, and causal understanding in environmental health studies. By emphasizing this integrated perspective, this review underscores AI's synergistic potential in addressing complex environmental health challenges and informing planetary health strategies.

Purpose of review: There are disparities in cancer incidence, mortality, and survival by race/ethnicity. As a result of structural mechanisms of discrimination, minoritized racial/ethnic groups are disproportionately exposed to higher levels of environmental carcinogens. Increased risk of exposure to harmful environmental pollutants may contribute to observed cancer disparities by race/ethnicity, but few studies have examined this effect. How race/ethnicity is operationalized in epidemiologic studies can impact interpretation of associations and potentially mask disparities, preventing the development of targeted public health interventions. We conducted a systematic review of epidemiologic studies on ambient environmental pollution and cancer outcomes in US adults and assessed how race/ethnicity was operationalized.

Recent findings: A total of 3,346 studies were identified. We found that of 172 studies that included race/ethnicity, 85/172 (49%) only considered race/ethnicity as a confounder. Of the remaining 87 studies, 60/87 (69%) stratified analyses by race/ethnicity, 9/87 (10%) were minority health studies that included one non-White racial/ethnic group, 18/87 (21%) examined estimated cancer risk as an outcome with race/ethnicity as the main exposure. Despite these limited analyses, many of these studies found stronger associations among racial/ethnic minority groups. One study examined environmental exposures as a causal mediator to explain potential disparities in cancer outcomes. There is a need for more research on racial/ethnic cancer disparities related to environmental pollutants. Researchers should consider developing data sources and leverage existing databases with robust racial/ethnic diversity and put ethical consideration into how race/ethnicity is included in conceptual frameworks to ensure fairness, equity, and clarity.

Purpose of review: Anaerobic manure digesters are a hotly debated and rapidly expanding technology that extracts biogas from animal manure. We assessed claims by proponents and opponents of the technology by reviewing evidence regarding digesters and pollutant emissions, occupational health, environmental injustice, economics, and climate.

Recent findings: Manure digesters can mitigate some impacts from industrial animal agriculture, such as odors and methane emissions, while potentially increasing or perpetuating others, such as ammonia emissions and nutrient pollution. While promoted as a climate solution, manure digesters only address a fraction of livestock-related greenhouse gas emissions and may exacerbate or introduce new occupational and community hazards, such as from flared biogas. Policies play a large role in subsidizing manure digesters, incentivizing further expansion of industrial animal agriculture-an industry with documented harms to rural populations. In summary, proponent claims in many cases overstated the evidence of actual benefits, while opponent concerns were either validated by the evidence or merit further investigation. Based on the current state of available evidence, manure digesters should not be promoted as a solution for manure management and energy production.

Purpose of review: This scoping review aimed to map the scientific literature on mortality related to climate change and environmental manifestations in the Mediterranean region, explore the different methodological approaches used, identify research gaps, and suggest future research directions. This scoping review was conducted following the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) recommendations and the Preferred Reporting Items for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). We included articles that examined the association between floods, wildfires, Saharan dust outbreaks, particulate matter (PM), urban heat islands (UHI), compound effects, and mortality.

Recent findings: Most studies have been conducted in Euro-Mediterranean countries, with limited studies in the remaining Mediterranean countries. Regression analysis and descriptive designs predominated, while spatial and mixed-methods designs were less frequently used. Flood mortality rates were higher in northeastern Spain, southern France, and northern Italy. The primary cause of flood mortality was drowning, with a seasonal west-east gradient. Furthermore, lagged exposure to PM₁₀ and PM_2.5 from wildfires was associated with cardiovascular and respiratory mortality in most countries. Additionally, Saharan dust exposure was associated with total and respiratory mortality, especially during dust intrusion days. Likewise, Ozone exposure was principally associated with total and cardiovascular mortality. Furthermore, PM₁₀ and ozone increased heat mortality when compounding in most of the studied Euro-Mediterranean cities. Our results showed substantial variability in mortality rates and causes associated with different climate change and environmental manifestations across the Mediterranean region. These findings highlight the urgent need for standardized and high-resolution mortality data to assess the health impacts of these hazards in understudied countries where health reporting is scarce.

Purpose of review: Estimating the effect of environmental mixtures on survival outcomes is common in epidemiological studies, yet the applicability and performance of advanced mixture modeling methods in this context remains underexplored. In this review, we identify available methods for this context and evaluate their performance via simulations.

Recent findings: We compared five methods - Cox Proportional Hazards (with/without penalized splines), Cox Elastic Net, Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART), and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS). Simulations showed log-linear models achieved low coverage when estimating individual exposure and mixture effects, especially under high exposure correlations and proportional hazards violations. More flexible models exhibited higher variability but improved coverage in effect estimation. While flexible models were better able to estimate mixture effect on survival outcomes compared to more constrained models for most simulation scenarios, they still introduced bias and often had high variability. Given real-world constraints like limited sample sizes and high censoring, there likely remains significant complexities for the application of flexible modeling for environmental mixtures for the survival analysis contexts. We recommend evaluating if findings are consistent across methods.